Linux fans fall back on this idea way, way too often. "Well, if the blah blah feature/item/function isn't to your liking, just write your own!"
It's fine to have that attitude, indeed that is the whole point of open source and free software, but then you can't also say that it is a viable replacement for the incumbents. Often the F/OSS community is intent on making academic arguments, what is possible in theory irrespective of whether it is in any way practical. Yes if software is open source then you can verify the security of it, but nobody can ever show you any software package and tell you it is secure because it is simply not practical to do so.
Citing the advantages is great but not if you're going to be completely disingenuous about the practicality of it. Nowhere is this better illustrated than OpenSSL, there are the claims that "open source is more secure because you can see the code" and that "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" yet OpenSSL is open source, used by almost everybody in the modern computing industry and literally its one thing is to do secure communication and we have seen huge security bugs in it! So it's really time to stop selling the idea of open source on disingenous claims of advantage and start using its real benefits.
Indeed. I'm willing to put up with a bit more power drain to have a browser that actually works. Edge is just terrible.
Obviously they aren't going to abandon building a browser and package some browser from a third party, every modern personal computing operating system comes with a browser so at least they've dropped their proprietary stuff like ActiveX and Silverlight as well as legacy IE extensions and are going for standards compliance, that's the only way to compete these days and more competition is always a good thing.
I love my Thinkpad. I could of bought it used off someone, but instead I spent much more money to buy it directly from Lenovo. Just to show my support.
That's a very good point. Not all companies do this so people need to show their support, unfortunately they are more likely to buy Apple or Samsung devices and just complain about their lack of repairability, if it's not a deal-breaker (despite the availability of viable alternatives) then why change?
The entire topic is about when it stops doing what you want it to do, and it needs to be repaired.
So you get it repaired under warranty. If it's out of warranty you can do what you like. But obviously if you are modifying the internals and you bring it in for a warranty repair the manufacturers dont want to be doing forensic analysis and then the inevitable argument about it to work out whether it was a manufacturing defect or the fault of your tinkering that caused the failure on a few hundred dollar phone.
With the tight level of integration of components that we see on devices now I can totally see their point, if you bring in a phone with a failed SoC how exactly are you going to prove it was a manufacturing defect and not your installation of that cheap replacement USB port? Everything is so tightly integrated that you can't really replace one little bit without potentially affecting a bunch of other sensitive components unlike on say, a PC, where you can replace the graphics card and it isn't going to affect the manufacturer's warranty on the CPU.
Sure, a customized version of the Linux kernel is used, but everything else typically associated with a Linux distribution has been thrown away.
Like what? It has a package manager, a filesystem, a shell, a DE, a networking stack, a windowing system, etc... It is componentized just like any GNU/Linux system.
"Unification" is exactly what GNU/Linux *doesn't* need. Innovation creeps up in the FOSS world through other projects, NOT through iteratively improving one core.
Google has certainly done a pretty good job of taking Linux, creating a OS platform in Android and making that available for hardware manufacturers and developers to target. Are the GNU/Linux distributions so much more innovative than Android? Seems to me pretty much everything new that has come out has been almost universally panned as being crap: upstart, wayland, mir, systemD, snap, GNOME3, Unity, etc, etc...
Whether you're running OpenRC, systemd, sysvinit, runit, or whatever, you're still GNU/Linux at the end of the day. The ability to pick and choose your software in Linux is a feature, not a bug. If you don't want configurability or choice, go use a BSD or literally any other OS.
Linux-based operating systems can have the same thing, there are even mature distributions that don't use systemd for example so why do you want to use the ones that use systemd rather than the ones that don't? What I mean is you want freedom of choice and there are hundreds of developers actively working on distributions that support that so maybe you should support them.
Trying to force GNU/Linux land to unify will destroy its software ecosystem. Hackers will move on and/or simply refuse to target the unified stack.
I don't think so, we haven't seen that happen on platforms like Windows, OS X, Android, iOS, etc... why would it happen with GNU/Linux?
I've heard of some developers actively putting code into their applications to exit early if it detects software that the author disagrees with. Things could get ugly fast.
It it's free software you can just remove the check and redistribute it.
Developers don't bother with Firefox these days because it is a niche browser on the PC which is an ever-shrinking section of the web browsing market. People test on Chrome because that covers the PC, Android phones & tablets as well as Chromebooks. Same goes for Safari because it is on the Mac, iPhones and iPads. Of course IE & Edge get some exposure by virtue of being available on 90%+ of PCs.
"Probably" is as good as you'll get for a legal question posed to a public forum, because most of us don't want to spend beaucoup bucks to hire a lawyer just to reply to a comment on Slashdot.
What I mean is that the eligibility depends on a number of factors, you dont know enough to say either way. More to the point you can't even say whether Apple would be infringing even if he did have it.
I guess what I want is Debian, but just before systemd was forced on Debian users.
So download that version of Debian then. But I suspect your request implicitly includes that you also want somebody to keep it and its package repositories patched and up to date for you free of charge.
Their version of FreeBSD has some subtle tweaks that makes it optimized for Azure
Well to work on Hyper-V, yes. Much like their contributions to the Linux kernel.
and also some tweaks that "de-optimize" it for Xen/KVM and other virtualization schemes
I can't see such a thing in the FreeBSD tree anywhere, can you point to where these "tweaks" are?
Say it with me... Embrace/Extend/Extinguish....
Seems to me that "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" actually means "Will become hugely popular", the phrase has only ever come up with Java and the result is that Java is the key language for the most prevalent mobile OS and can also be used on Windows, Linux and OSX among other platforms. Some people have tried to pretend they applied to HTML too, if that's true then it indeed supports the argument that it's a good thing because HTML is a broad open standard and even Microsoft themselves are pushing for the elimination of proprietary plugins. They killed off their own ActiveX and sliverlight support in favor of open standards. People also said it about them contributing to Linux yet it is now used even more widely than before, on Microsoft's own platform no less.
Except that's not true today. Both current versions of the big consoles on the market are simply low-powered PC's with a basic x86 OS to do the workload.
Did you not read? The OS does not suffer the overhead of desktop OSes, they are specialized, stripped down OSes. The hardware is indeed very similar to PC hardware but as I already said the difference with consoles is you know every detail and can optimize for them rather than having to do a high-level generic solution that is not at all optimized for the target platform.
Neither are they more efficient, if they were when you're porting from x86 to x86 the developer would be able to use that "extra horse power" to optimize the game even further.
They are more efficiently utilized because they are a consistent platform to target rather than an inconsistent, fragmented one like the PC.
Does this mean Netflix in Firefox will finally run at 1080p? I almost switched to Chrome for this, but I'm too ingrained into Fx with the UI and my favorite plugins.
Why not just use both? Can't you just use Chrome for Netflix and Firefox for the rest? These are browers, not religions.
Well you can get a Windows PC for $200 cheaper, of course then it runs Windows and you spend hours commenting on slashdot about how Microsoft's latest antics are negatively affecting you, but hey, you saved $200 so it must be totally worth it.
...funnily enough most of those Windows PCs can run OS X anyway.
Instead, accept that the inherent design limitations of consoles requires that they be underpowered vs PCs.
Everybody already accepts that they are less powerful, but that doesnt matter because they are far more efficient. Using a lower level API and targeting a consistent platform means you don't have to worry that your customers have different combinations of CPU features, cache, speed, cores and different GPU architectures, features, memory amount, memory speed, bus speed and system RAM amount/speed, output screen resolution as well as different OS versions, drivers and running applications. This is how console games can be so much more efficient at exploiting system hardware compared to PCs, because all the target devices are the same, that is an advantage and you don't have overpowered and wasteful PC hardware that you then have to tweak settings to make things work properly.
I'm currently using Fedora 24 Beta. No issues or hacking so far. I'm using Firefox on Gnome 3 on Wayland, listening music over Pulse-audio, systemd under the hood.
I think you should re-check your preposterous statements.
We're just seeing the exact same criticisms we have seen of Linux in the past getting rehashed. The old "linux is crap because my sound/3d/printer/whatever does work" meanwhile most people are using it just fine.
You think forcing an upgrade on people is a minor annoyance? omg lol
Yes, actually you exclusive Windows users are a long way behind the times. When a new version of iOS comes out people upgrade, when a new OS X version comes out people upgrade, Ubuntu users apt-get dist-upgrade regularly, Android users (when they are lucky enough to get them) do an OS upgrade when it comes through. In face most of the complaints surrounding Android about people not getting enough upgrades!
We are all used to upgrading our systems in a reasonable timeframe after the upgrade has been released, it only seems to be Windows users that don't do this. Of course that may be due to the fact that almost all (actually maybe all of them) have been paid upgrades rather than free ones.
It boggles my mind how people rightly complain about this and all the other abuses by Microsoft, then go right out and buy another PC with Windows.Self-inflicted much?
Jeez people just vote with your wallet already.
So if you've chosen to use something you're not allowed to complain that it isn't perfect? The auto-upgrade to Windows 10 was a minor annoyance and it should have been handled better but in the end all my Windows programs still run just as they did before.
Sure if it's a "critical" problem then the answer is to change, it will be difficult and probably require time and monetary contributions/investments to make sure alternative programs are available but that's the cost.
I said you don't need a Windows PC, look you even quoted it here:
How many people do you think are doing their "political talk" - or any social networking for that matter - from their Windows PCs?
Probably most of them, because political talk actually requires a fair amount of typing unless it's in txtspeak, and only an idiot would want to do large amounts of typing on a smartphone, and try to read stuff on a 5" screen.
Clearly "a 5" screen" is not the only alternative to a Windows PC and if you already know that then what exactly is your point?
Probably most of them, because political talk actually requires a fair amount of typing unless it's in txtspeak, and only an idiot would want to do large amounts of typing on a smartphone, and try to read stuff on a 5" screen.
Why does it require a lot of typing? And why do you think the only device you can type on is a Windows PC? Seriously you think political talk would actually be shut down if people couldn't use Windows? I think you're pandering to a dependence on Windows a bit too much there, you need to educate yourself on the many, many alternatives for communication.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux fans fall back on this idea way, way too often. "Well, if the blah blah feature/item/function isn't to your liking, just write your own!"
It's fine to have that attitude, indeed that is the whole point of open source and free software, but then you can't also say that it is a viable replacement for the incumbents. Often the F/OSS community is intent on making academic arguments, what is possible in theory irrespective of whether it is in any way practical. Yes if software is open source then you can verify the security of it, but nobody can ever show you any software package and tell you it is secure because it is simply not practical to do so.
Citing the advantages is great but not if you're going to be completely disingenuous about the practicality of it. Nowhere is this better illustrated than OpenSSL, there are the claims that "open source is more secure because you can see the code" and that "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" yet OpenSSL is open source, used by almost everybody in the modern computing industry and literally its one thing is to do secure communication and we have seen huge security bugs in it! So it's really time to stop selling the idea of open source on disingenous claims of advantage and start using its real benefits.
He omitted his formatting, seems you needed it:
<sarcasm> ... </sarcasm>
Indeed. I'm willing to put up with a bit more power drain to have a browser that actually works. Edge is just terrible.
Obviously they aren't going to abandon building a browser and package some browser from a third party, every modern personal computing operating system comes with a browser so at least they've dropped their proprietary stuff like ActiveX and Silverlight as well as legacy IE extensions and are going for standards compliance, that's the only way to compete these days and more competition is always a good thing.
A lobbyist just opens the discussion by saying "I represent this many people associated with this organization, and they have this concern".
...and also here is a buttload of "campaign donations" to make you see it our way.
I love my Thinkpad. I could of bought it used off someone, but instead I spent much more money to buy it directly from Lenovo. Just to show my support.
That's a very good point. Not all companies do this so people need to show their support, unfortunately they are more likely to buy Apple or Samsung devices and just complain about their lack of repairability, if it's not a deal-breaker (despite the availability of viable alternatives) then why change?
The entire topic is about when it stops doing what you want it to do, and it needs to be repaired.
So you get it repaired under warranty. If it's out of warranty you can do what you like. But obviously if you are modifying the internals and you bring it in for a warranty repair the manufacturers dont want to be doing forensic analysis and then the inevitable argument about it to work out whether it was a manufacturing defect or the fault of your tinkering that caused the failure on a few hundred dollar phone.
With the tight level of integration of components that we see on devices now I can totally see their point, if you bring in a phone with a failed SoC how exactly are you going to prove it was a manufacturing defect and not your installation of that cheap replacement USB port? Everything is so tightly integrated that you can't really replace one little bit without potentially affecting a bunch of other sensitive components unlike on say, a PC, where you can replace the graphics card and it isn't going to affect the manufacturer's warranty on the CPU.
Sure, a customized version of the Linux kernel is used, but everything else typically associated with a Linux distribution has been thrown away.
Like what? It has a package manager, a filesystem, a shell, a DE, a networking stack, a windowing system, etc ... It is componentized just like any GNU/Linux system.
"Unification" is exactly what GNU/Linux *doesn't* need. Innovation creeps up in the FOSS world through other projects, NOT through iteratively improving one core.
Google has certainly done a pretty good job of taking Linux, creating a OS platform in Android and making that available for hardware manufacturers and developers to target. Are the GNU/Linux distributions so much more innovative than Android? Seems to me pretty much everything new that has come out has been almost universally panned as being crap: upstart, wayland, mir, systemD, snap, GNOME3, Unity, etc, etc ...
Whether you're running OpenRC, systemd, sysvinit, runit, or whatever, you're still GNU/Linux at the end of the day. The ability to pick and choose your software in Linux is a feature, not a bug. If you don't want configurability or choice, go use a BSD or literally any other OS.
Linux-based operating systems can have the same thing, there are even mature distributions that don't use systemd for example so why do you want to use the ones that use systemd rather than the ones that don't? What I mean is you want freedom of choice and there are hundreds of developers actively working on distributions that support that so maybe you should support them.
Trying to force GNU/Linux land to unify will destroy its software ecosystem. Hackers will move on and/or simply refuse to target the unified stack.
I don't think so, we haven't seen that happen on platforms like Windows, OS X, Android, iOS, etc ... why would it happen with GNU/Linux?
I've heard of some developers actively putting code into their applications to exit early if it detects software that the author disagrees with. Things could get ugly fast.
It it's free software you can just remove the check and redistribute it.
despite the fact Firefox will do HTML 5 video.
Developers don't bother with Firefox these days because it is a niche browser on the PC which is an ever-shrinking section of the web browsing market. People test on Chrome because that covers the PC, Android phones & tablets as well as Chromebooks. Same goes for Safari because it is on the Mac, iPhones and iPads. Of course IE & Edge get some exposure by virtue of being available on 90%+ of PCs.
"Probably" isn't good enough.
"Probably" is as good as you'll get for a legal question posed to a public forum, because most of us don't want to spend beaucoup bucks to hire a lawyer just to reply to a comment on Slashdot.
What I mean is that the eligibility depends on a number of factors, you dont know enough to say either way. More to the point you can't even say whether Apple would be infringing even if he did have it.
Probably common-law rights in the unregistered mark "Breathe" in the field of smartwatch apps.
"Probably" isn't good enough. And even if he did that still doesn't mean Apple was infringing upon it by using it in the way they did.
Did he have a trademark that Apple are infringing upon?
I guess what I want is Debian, but just before systemd was forced on Debian users.
So download that version of Debian then. But I suspect your request implicitly includes that you also want somebody to keep it and its package repositories patched and up to date for you free of charge.
Their version of FreeBSD has some subtle tweaks that makes it optimized for Azure
Well to work on Hyper-V, yes. Much like their contributions to the Linux kernel.
and also some tweaks that "de-optimize" it for Xen/KVM and other virtualization schemes
I can't see such a thing in the FreeBSD tree anywhere, can you point to where these "tweaks" are?
Say it with me... Embrace/Extend/Extinguish....
Seems to me that "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" actually means "Will become hugely popular", the phrase has only ever come up with Java and the result is that Java is the key language for the most prevalent mobile OS and can also be used on Windows, Linux and OSX among other platforms. Some people have tried to pretend they applied to HTML too, if that's true then it indeed supports the argument that it's a good thing because HTML is a broad open standard and even Microsoft themselves are pushing for the elimination of proprietary plugins. They killed off their own ActiveX and sliverlight support in favor of open standards. People also said it about them contributing to Linux yet it is now used even more widely than before, on Microsoft's own platform no less.
think of all the iOS, OSX (err, macOS), tvOS, and watchOS devices?
Not to mention the tens of millions of playstation 4s.
Sorry yes, that should have been "most people who use Linux".
Except that's not true today. Both current versions of the big consoles on the market are simply low-powered PC's with a basic x86 OS to do the workload.
Did you not read? The OS does not suffer the overhead of desktop OSes, they are specialized, stripped down OSes. The hardware is indeed very similar to PC hardware but as I already said the difference with consoles is you know every detail and can optimize for them rather than having to do a high-level generic solution that is not at all optimized for the target platform.
Neither are they more efficient, if they were when you're porting from x86 to x86 the developer would be able to use that "extra horse power" to optimize the game even further.
They are more efficiently utilized because they are a consistent platform to target rather than an inconsistent, fragmented one like the PC.
Does this mean Netflix in Firefox will finally run at 1080p? I almost switched to Chrome for this, but I'm too ingrained into Fx with the UI and my favorite plugins.
Why not just use both? Can't you just use Chrome for Netflix and Firefox for the rest? These are browers, not religions.
WTF? $500 isn't cheap enough???
Well you can get a Windows PC for $200 cheaper, of course then it runs Windows and you spend hours commenting on slashdot about how Microsoft's latest antics are negatively affecting you, but hey, you saved $200 so it must be totally worth it.
...funnily enough most of those Windows PCs can run OS X anyway.
Instead, accept that the inherent design limitations of consoles requires that they be underpowered vs PCs.
Everybody already accepts that they are less powerful, but that doesnt matter because they are far more efficient. Using a lower level API and targeting a consistent platform means you don't have to worry that your customers have different combinations of CPU features, cache, speed, cores and different GPU architectures, features, memory amount, memory speed, bus speed and system RAM amount/speed, output screen resolution as well as different OS versions, drivers and running applications. This is how console games can be so much more efficient at exploiting system hardware compared to PCs, because all the target devices are the same, that is an advantage and you don't have overpowered and wasteful PC hardware that you then have to tweak settings to make things work properly.
I'm currently using Fedora 24 Beta. No issues or hacking so far. I'm using Firefox on Gnome 3 on Wayland, listening music over Pulse-audio, systemd under the hood.
I think you should re-check your preposterous statements.
We're just seeing the exact same criticisms we have seen of Linux in the past getting rehashed. The old "linux is crap because my sound/3d/printer/whatever does work" meanwhile most people are using it just fine.
You think forcing an upgrade on people is a minor annoyance? omg lol
Yes, actually you exclusive Windows users are a long way behind the times. When a new version of iOS comes out people upgrade, when a new OS X version comes out people upgrade, Ubuntu users apt-get dist-upgrade regularly, Android users (when they are lucky enough to get them) do an OS upgrade when it comes through. In face most of the complaints surrounding Android about people not getting enough upgrades!
We are all used to upgrading our systems in a reasonable timeframe after the upgrade has been released, it only seems to be Windows users that don't do this. Of course that may be due to the fact that almost all (actually maybe all of them) have been paid upgrades rather than free ones.
It boggles my mind how people rightly complain about this and all the other abuses by Microsoft, then go right out and buy another PC with Windows.Self-inflicted much?
Jeez people just vote with your wallet already.
So if you've chosen to use something you're not allowed to complain that it isn't perfect? The auto-upgrade to Windows 10 was a minor annoyance and it should have been handled better but in the end all my Windows programs still run just as they did before.
Sure if it's a "critical" problem then the answer is to change, it will be difficult and probably require time and monetary contributions/investments to make sure alternative programs are available but that's the cost.
How many people do you think are doing their "political talk" - or any social networking for that matter - from their Windows PCs?
Probably most of them, because political talk actually requires a fair amount of typing unless it's in txtspeak, and only an idiot would want to do large amounts of typing on a smartphone, and try to read stuff on a 5" screen.
Clearly "a 5" screen" is not the only alternative to a Windows PC and if you already know that then what exactly is your point?
Probably most of them, because political talk actually requires a fair amount of typing unless it's in txtspeak, and only an idiot would want to do large amounts of typing on a smartphone, and try to read stuff on a 5" screen.
Why does it require a lot of typing? And why do you think the only device you can type on is a Windows PC? Seriously you think political talk would actually be shut down if people couldn't use Windows? I think you're pandering to a dependence on Windows a bit too much there, you need to educate yourself on the many, many alternatives for communication.